Stay on target

For too long the definition of “Game of the Year” has been unfairly narrow. How boring is it to see every website shower the same stale AAA games with praise at the end of each holiday season? So at Geek.com we’re doing what we can to put a stop to this in Game of the Year, a new column celebrating worthy alternative picks for the year’s greatest game regardless of genre, platform, year of release, or even quality. Here, any game can be Game of the Year!

Four years ago I visited Trinket Studios’s office/apartment as part of an investigate odyssey into Chicago’s awesome indie video development scene. At the time the three-person team had just launched Color Sheep, a jaunty color-matching puzzle game for mobile. But a whiteboard in the corner listed several ideas for future games, including a game inspired by Japanese fever dream cooking show Iron Chef.

Fast forward to today and I’ve now finally played the finished Nintendo Switch version of Battle Chef Brigade, Trinket’s cooking/RPG/puzzle game also for PC and eventually other consoles. And like a real meal, the low and slow development has resulted in something complex and delicious.

Like the intricate recipes players are tasked to create, Battle Chef Brigade is made up ingredients that don’t initially seem compatible. Players control Mina, a young upstart chef looking to make a name for herself in fabulous chef battles. Beyond the obvious Iron Chef inspiration seen in the lore and elaborate competition sequences (there’s a charismatic chomping chairman for crying out loud) Japanese touches appear throughout. The gorgeous hand drawn art style looks like something out of a delicate anime from a Miyazaki student. Traversing the town, gathering items, and taking on quests feels like exploring a classic JRPG world, even if Prompto doesn’t show up.

Then there’s the cooking itself, where Battle Chef Brigade begins to turn its influences into something more original. To make a meal players must first hunt down monsters and plants themselves. The agile and airborne combat, full of slashing and leaping and magic spells, recalls Vanillaware games like Odin Sphere or Muramasa. Bring the harvest back to the pantry and start cooking. Once dropped into the pot, each ingredient turns into a cluster of colored gems. Players then “stir” to rearrange these gems and create combos like in a match-3 puzzle game. If you enjoyed the mix of light RPG and match-3 puzzle gameplay in hit Japanese mobile game franchise Puzzle and Dragons you’ll dig this.

Each gameplay element on its own isn’t too complicated. But stacked together they become a lot to handle. In a way, balancing the tension is the closest the game’s abstract cooking metaphor gets to feeling like actual cooking, since you’re otherwise more worried about points than subjective creative taste combinations, Overcooked-style multiplayer mayhem, or Cooking Mama-esque minigames.

Initially, each round lasts five minutes, and it’s up to you to figure out how to manage your time. You can only carry so many ingredients at once, so do you alternate between hunting and cooking? How much is a certain ingredient worth to you? Do you take the time to offer a bird some meat so you can steal its egg? Or do you just slaughter the bird? As gems cook without being matched they grow in intensity, so do you wait for them to be just right? Each round requires you to use a special ingredient like bull or dragon meat, but judges also have individual taste preferences to consider. Different characters play differently, especially when using different items.

Even the pot or pan you use will alter your strategy since it changes the way you move gems. This is a cooking game where you fiddle with your loadout. Use water sauce to recolor gems for bigger combos or a cookbook that rewards you for using every part of the fantasy buffalo. Use a cutting board to cut out bones and make merging dishes easier. An oven can slowly improve your dish while you go hunt for more ingredients. And improving your combat and magic capabilities can make it that much easier to take down an especially delicious monster.

As you work your way through the charming, voice-acted campaign, you’ll have to adapt to even more varied kitchen nightmares. Cooking one meal with one focus is one thing. But can you balance three different meals for different judges with different tastes? All while including the theme ingredient? Oh, and how will you handle the fragile or poisonous gems caused by tainted monster meat? It can get legitimately, realistically stressful, to the point of no longer being fun, which is why you shouldn’t rush through the relatively brief campaign. The bite-sized nature of battles makes it easy to pace yourself playing portably on Switch.

But even outside of the campaign, there’s a surprising variety, depth, and expressiveness to Battle Chef’s Brigade mechanics that makes it worth replaying in modes like daily challenges. During the last few seconds of a match, while frantically trying to combine two pots together, I wasn’t thinking about the puzzle. I was thinking about the meal. When I hunted monsters, crafted new recipes by solving set puzzles, or fed hungry customers by rapidly matching certain gem sets, I fully bought into the premise in a way that was kind of magical.

Battle Chef Brigade is also another example of just how cool and savvy a video game publisher Adult Swim has become. We weren’t too surprised when the publisher made joke games like Robot Unicorn Attack or games based on their cartoons like Pocket Mortysor Virtual Rickality. But between this and Jazzpunk and Headlander and Duck Game and many others, Adult Swim has quietly become a powerful force for delivering legitimately fascinating independent video games. Good on them! And Battle Chef Brigade makes perfect sense for the publisher. Its concept initially seems like a joke. The game is set in a completely sincere world of “soldier chefs” for crying out loud. But it’s fleshed out to its logical awesome end point.

It seems like fate that Battle Chef Brigade dropped on Nintendo Switch around the same time as Octodad: Dadliest Catch, seeing as they are both made by Chicago developers I have personal connections with. And I’m not going to lie. Watching Battle Chef Brigade go from embryonic concept to successful Kickstarter to finished fun Nintendo game is something I’ve really enjoyed over my career.

But even setting all that aside, Battle Chef Brigade excellently executes on its gastronomical gameplay vision with carefully selected familiar mechanics mixed into something totally novel. If you like RPGs, puzzles, graceful action, great art, cooking, eating, or any combination of those, pick it up.